


Mother's Mercy

by SydneyLouWho



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, TW for brief talk of suicide, Women In Power, aka just me taking what GRRM wrote and saying "bye", in a big way, the "major character death" tag is no joke, there are a lot of deaths
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-18
Updated: 2019-04-17
Packaged: 2020-01-15 19:10:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18505270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SydneyLouWho/pseuds/SydneyLouWho
Summary: Robert's Rebellion has ended in fire and blood.  Aerys burns the capital leaving thousands dead, but all is not lost. In a kingdom with a seven-year-old rightful king, a government in fragments, and a rising resistance against the Targaryen name itself, three women must pick up the pieces of the mess their husbands created.AU in which Rhaella, Joanna, and Elia live and everything is changed.





	Mother's Mercy

**Author's Note:**

> Ok so this is something I wrote years ago, but I found fully completed drafts of a couple chapters and a full outline of the plot while looking through my documents and thought it might be worth going back to, because I still love the concept. Thanks so much to Laurel (grumkin_snark here and samwpmarleau on tumblr) for convincing me to post this and helping me edit it.

**Prologue: Elia**

King’s Landing is burning.

Initially there had been blasts, shocking green sending stones flying through the air, but now everything is ash and flame and smoke. Elia gasps for breath, her lungs aching from the thick grey that blankets the air around her and the flecks of ash that fall like burning snow.

The blasts subside, but stones continue to crumble, the remnants of the Maegor’s Holdfast crashing around her.

At first, she can think of nothing but the burning of her skin and throat, but soon she remembers them. _Rhaenys. Aegon. My babies._ She tries to scream for them, but the words turn to ash in her scorched throat. She tries to cry, but the tears are dried by the suffocating heat that consumes her.

She reaches toward the sky, the ceiling, whatever is above her, but she feels only stone.  She is trapped. The air is too thick, and she cannot tell if she is blind or if it is too dark or if the smoke is too heavy. The silence is heavy now, but for simmering of the stones. Too silent, and she wonders if the whole world has burned.

Elia manages to drag herself, despite the pain that is everywhere and the breath that is nowhere, toward something, anything.  She claws through ash toward a speck of light, the only thing she can see in the darkness around her. It could be a trick of the mind, but she can’t afford to care.  She just wants to breathe. To find her children. To pull herself from the rubble of her home.

The light grows larger and seems to dance through the columns of smoke that hang stagnant in the air.  The world is hazy, but she drags herself still, finding strength she didn’t know was hidden in her fragile bones.  Time passes slowly. She wonders if she has been crawling for minutes, or hours, or days. Finally, Elia reaches the light, reaches her hands up for anything as her vision grows dark at the edges, screaming with a voice that does not exist.  Her fingertips find stone and she pulls herself up with every ounce of strength left to her.

She pulls herself out into open air, onto the burning stones above, and gasps one desperate breath before she fades.

…

Elia wakes to a terrible heat that rises from everywhere.   _Rhaenys.  Aegon. My babies.  Where are they?_ She pulls herself up onto her hands, taking in her new surroundings.  The smoke is still heavy in the air, but it no longer chokes her as it did when she was still in her chambers.

Rising to her feet, Elia steadies herself on trembling legs.  She wishes she would hear screaming, the crying of her babes, but only silence rings in her ears.   _Perhaps I am deaf.  Perhaps I cannot hear their screams._

But she still hears the crackling of the fire beneath the stones, raging on even after stealing everything worth preserving in this city.  

Elia looks to the ground, and for the first time she glimpses herself.  Her hands are burnt and bloody, the stench of her searing flesh now pungent in the air.  She wonders why she cannot feel them, how she cannot feel anything but fear for her children.

_Where am I?_ she wonders, trying to find landmarks where there are none.  Rhaenys and Aegon were in the Holdfast as well. They were so near her.  How can they be gone?

Her feet move against the screaming in her head.  There are no holes in the stones, she notices, and she cannot even pinpoint where she pulled herself from beneath the rubble.  But still she stumbles forward, hoping foolishly that her children would be waiting for her through the curtains of smoke.

For hours, truly hours, she walks, and the pain soon becomes evident.  It is everywhere, from the blackened and burned soles of her feet to her face where the heat seems to rise from her very skin.

But still she trudges forward, unsure where her will has risen from.

_Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken_ , she repeats to herself, though she doesn’t feel unbroken.

A memory, unbidden, rises in her mind.  When she was very young, not even past her tenth nameday, and sick with fever, Elia had been bedridden.  It was the only time she wished herself dead, when the coils of illness had attempted to strangle her yet again.  She was tired and weak, but her mother had sat upon her bed and placed a kiss upon her sticky brow.

“Oh Elia,” she had said, “I wish dearly that you were well, but I know you will not let the Stranger take you today, or any day.  You are so much stronger than you know, my child.”

_You are so much stronger than you know._  But she doesn’t feel strong.  Her body aches for her to stop, to lie upon the burning stones and let death lead her from the heat.  It seems almost as if some force pulls her forward, an invisible hand dragging her through the smoke and ash, through the place that had been her home for the past several years.

Somehow she finds herself at what’s left of the gates, a collapsed archway and some raised stones around it.  And there is grass, ashen grey, but grass all the same. Her feet sink into the soil and nothing has ever felt so wonderful against her toes.

It takes her eyes a moment to focus upon them, the dark masses moving toward her.  When they come nearer she can see that they are men, dressed not as an army, but as smallfolk.  “My lady,” they call, “Have you come from the city?”

She opens her mouth to speak but she feels as though water hasn’t touched her lips for many moons, so she settles on nodding frantically as she continues to stumble forward, the world swirling and tipping.

“Catch her,” she hears one of the men say.  “She’s going to fall.”

And fall she does.

…

When she wakes next, her surroundings are entirely unfamiliar.  She presumes she is in a tent, as the white walls flap in the wind, but she hasn’t an idea of _whose_ tent.

“Ah, so you still live,” a voice comes from the corner of the room, and Elia startles at the sudden sound.  “Can you tell me who you are, my lady? Or at least I presume you are highborn, as the poor rarely have jewelry as fine as that gold circlet you wore around your head.”  

An aging woman steps from the shadows, her hair as white as the billowing tent.  Elia opens her mouth again, but only a choked cough escapes. The woman hands her a goblet and Elia takes it eagerly.  “Drink, child,” the woman says. “I tried to give you water as you slept, but you would only allow a few small drops.”

The goblet is drained in seconds. Elia once again wills herself to speak but her throat is still thick.  She manages to choke out only two words: “Rhaenys. Aegon.” Her voice sounds strange, but the words are clear enough.

The woman tilts her head slightly, her brows furrowed, before her eyes widen. “Princess Elia,” she gasps, and Elia manages a slight nod.

Elia feels herself fading once again.  The image of the white-haired woman drifts in and out in the flickering light of the candles.  She is handed another cup, this one filled with a milky liquid. Milk of the poppy. She remembers it from her childhood.   _It will take away the pain.  You won’t think about them for a moment._ She lets the liquid fall past her lips.

“Rest, child,” she hears the now-familiar voice say. “We will take you to Rosby.  You will be safe, Princess.”

_Safe_ , she thinks as her eyelids grow heavy.  She has forgotten what that word means.

…

Next she knows, Elia is buried in a featherbed.  For a brief, sweet moment she thinks it’s her own bed, that the past days had been a fevered dream.  It is a hope, but a foolish one, because even the the walls of this castle are nothing compared to the grandeur of King’s Landing. Or its _former_ grandeur, she reminds herself.

This time she takes note of her condition.  Her hands and feet are heavily bandaged, and she can barely move her toes and fingers.  They still hurt, though. She can also feel a cloth upon her cheek and wrapped around her forehead.  She touches her fingers to them, and even the pressure upon the cloth sends pain shooting down her spine.  Her fingers then touch her hair, and she can feel her scalp among the patches of thick hair. The fire took so much of her, she wonders if there is anything left.

The castle is simple, but she takes to exploring it as soon as she is able, if only to train her legs to walk again.  The woman, whom she soon knows to be named Rowena, is a faithful servant of House Rosby and a self-trained healer touted as more skilled than even Rosby’s maester.

While she slowly moves on trembling legs, one hand upon the wall for support, she asks Rowena questions, though with her strained voice they are hardly eloquent.  

“What happened?” she croaks, trying not to wince as her unbandaged feet touch the stones of the hall.   _These stones look so similar to the others, yet they are so cool._

“It is not known fully, my princess,” she says, her face a grim mask.  “Not many lived to tell the tale, only a couple hundred, most from the outskirts of the city where the flames could not reach.”  

Two hundred.  Out of half a million.

Elia stumbles and Rowena’s hands reach out to steady her.  She should feel embarrassed, having to learn to walk again like a babe, but in truth Elia hasn’t felt much of anything in the weeks she has spent here.

“Lord Rosby has received word of wildfire, and there are whispers that King Aerys himself wished to burn the city to the ground, though that is a treasonous sort of gossip.” She gives Elia a questioning look.

Elia turns her eyes to the ground.  Aerys’ obsession with fire had always made her uneasy, but to speak ill of the king would be pointless and even dangerous.

“It will be here soon,” Rowena continues, “the ship that will take you to Dragonstone.  I shall miss you dearly, little princess, though our conversations tend to be a bit one-sided.”  A crooked smile lights the old woman’s wrinkled face, and for once Elia returns the gesture.

“Thank…you,” she manages.  Rowena has been kind to her.  She had rushed from Rosby as soon as word was received of the great tragedy in its neighbor city and has stayed with Elia ever since.  For that, Elia is grateful. Rowena’s jests have distracted her from the memories that always threaten to swallow her.

Rowena cannot help her, though, at night. Every night without fail, her nightmares are the same.  She is back there in the rubble, stumbling and gasping for breath that doesn’t come.

And this time she carries in her arms the bones of her babies, flesh burnt from them, through the ash and smoke.  

Even in daylight she is constantly reminded of them and if Rowena was not there to distract her, their memories would consume her every thought.  Her meals remind her of Rhaenys, how the child loved to eat anything and everything the kitchen would serve her (and they served her a lot, given that she was such a sweet child and a princess at that).  And every babe she sees reminds her of Aegon, whose open-mouthed smile was the light in her darkest days.

Life is stagnant in Rosby, strange, as if she is tucked in a cocoon far from the tragedies that have befallen the capital only a day’s ride away and the tragedies that have befallen her family.  Her poor babies.

The mirror is just as strange, reflecting a pale girl with faded eyes and bubbling skin.  Her hair is left in clumps upon her head, so Rowena wraps a silken scarf around it each morning.  She is told there will be scars, many of them, but Elia only cares about the scars they cannot see.

She hears their whispers, sees their stares.   _So lucky_ , they say, _to be alive still_.  But Elia does not feel lucky.  She only feels hollow.

…

It is a day’s ride to the bay.  Elia is housed in a covered carriage and is told that for her own safety, she mustn’t leave.  She has gathered from the bits of gossip she hears that the realm is in shambles, with no ruler and no capital.  Too many died in King’s Landing to count, from Targaryen loyalists to the entirety of the rebel army to thousands upon thousands of smallfolk.

Elia cannot ponder long on this news, else images of dead babies riddle her mind and send her into fits of wild panic that leave her curled up in the corner of the caravan with Rowena’s arms wrapped around her shoulders.  It happens often, now, that she loses control of her mind, and her confinement does nothing to help.

Speaking is a laborious task for Elia still, so Rowena passes the time with her stories.  She often tells of her childhood in Rosby, how she befriended the lady Bethany in their youth and had grown into the favor of her mother and brother.  The way she tells her life is so simple and happy, Elia wishes hers could be the same.

The time in the caravan seems to drag endlessly with nothing to see but its wooden framing.  Elia can’t help but wonder if keeping her hidden would make any difference, truly, since she is sure her face must be unrecognizable with the burn marks.

When they reach the bay and set up camp, Elia is finally able to move about.  She moves gingerly, careful not to press too hard on the soles of her feet. She watches the bay with Rowena, standing near the cliff and waiting for sails to disturb the horizon.

And one day Rowena is called away, leaving Elia alone for the first time since she walked from the ruins of the capital.

She isn’t truly alone.  Tents and pavilions stand tall behind her, with plenty of men ready to protect her, but looking out at the choppy waters of the bay it feels as though Elia is the only person left.

Elia stands near the drop of the cliff, her toes pressing against stones.   _If I could just take two more steps…_ She moves forward a bit, her bare toes sending pebbles falling to the water below.

It wouldn’t be a noble death, no, and not one befitting of a princess, but perhaps it is what she deserves.   _After all_ , she thinks, _I am the mother who abandoned her children and left them to die._

Perhaps if she just took that step, the Stranger would take her to Rhaenys and Aegon and they could all be together again.

She steps forward, a miniscule step.  And again. The wind catches her dress, sending it billowing behind her, and she breathes in the air, lets her head fall back so she can see the sky.  It really is a beautiful day. She lifts a foot, prepares for that final step, before someone grabs her from behind and pulls her back.

“My lady, my princess…” a boy says, his breath heavy.  “We’ve spotted the ship on the horizon. You will be leaving soon.”


End file.
